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Rud's moods in those early days fluctuated widely. There were those narrow and intense moods of fear and hatred, from which he never freed himself. There were simply base phases when he schemed treacherously. There were unruffled moods of lucid understanding, when everything in life seemed cold and clear and plain, but these were comparatively rare. Things he had read, things Bodisham had argued, stray comments of Chiffan's, would flash together then into a transparent realisation. "Of course!" he would say to himself. Rare as they were, these clairvoyant interludes supplied the living material for most of his political utterances. He knew their value, he listened to himself then with a detached respect, and he made the fullest use of them.

Beneath all these again, there were moods, more and more exalted moods, of pure reverie. They were no longer the objective reveries of his boyish days, dreams of battle and conquest. Now they were anticipations of a subtler and more intimate ascendency. They were concerned now with will power and domination over minds. They were pervaded by an intensifying self–appreciation. He kept them secret, as he imagined, from everyone. He would have hesitated to let anyone suspect how highly he could think of himself. He had a power over people. He had something peculiarly great in himself. But not a word about that. He had a feeling that ultimately recognition must come from some outside source, some one must be bound to announce his true quality, but until that realisation came from without, his true quality must remain secret within himself…

In these phases of private exaltation, it seemed to him that his idea of identifying himself with the Common Man was one of the most brilliant inspirations that had ever come to mortal intelligence. It had arisen in his mind with scarcely any premeditation, in the course of speeches and talking. It had seemed at first the merest poetry, just a new bright phrasing of the sympathetic element in the democratic faith. Then he began to realise that it penetrated to the very core of the human situation, as he beheld it. He was something greater than the minds about him. He really was greater. His reveries nowadays were more and more in the fashion of imaginary critical biography. He projected himself outside of himself in order to get a better view of himself.

"The Common Man Emergent," that was one of the phrases he found most acceptable in those opium dreams of his, dreams that he needed no opium to produce. The Common Man gathered together humanity, purified it, rendered it. The Common Man Emergent became his mystical self–divinity.

For the purpose of that imaginary biography he devised a new background of revolutions, a history leading right up to himself. He invented an ancient world before the dawn of history in which the masterful men, the terrifying people, the cruelty dealers, the punishers, the lords and priests, ruled without challenge, and the common man knew his master and obeyed the tradition imposed upon him from the cradle to the grave. To Rud the past had always seemed horrible. There was no golden age for him. It was, he was convinced, a cruel world, that early world of barbarism which first breaks into history. Yet already the Common Man was beginning to wake up, to protest, to assert himself. Plebeians were rising against Patricians, democracies against aristocrats. History opened out for Rud as the Martyrdom of Man, the sacrifice of the Common Man, in face of a gathering protest on the part of the overpowered common people.

Christianity, he theorised, had been an outstanding effort of the common man to find release from repressions, from kings, emperors and priests, Pharisees and the Law, in a frank cosmopolitan brotherhood. It was not the only revolt, but in many ways it was the principal and typical revolt. Its insistence on the common fatherhood of God, all men equal in his eyes and so forth, was its fundamental quality, But it had been corrupted early. Instead of a Rud to express it, a lucid, simple Rud, it had fallen beneath the sway of—Saint Paul.

Nobody seemed to love Saint Paul really. Even the theologians. He was the greatest and least ingratiating of all the makers of Christianity, the Founder's whipping boy. But Rud's private blasphemies did not stop at Saint Paul. He dared to think with the most atrocious boldness of matters that even infidels have hitherto treated with respect. His private scorn for the "inefficiency" of the Founder of Christianity for example was fantastic. Here was a Message, he argued; it was a message of the utmost importance to all the world, and he chose twelve disciples to record it and spread it, and not a stenographer among them!

Stenographer's a modern idea! Rud would have protested. Not a bit of it. Cicero was using stenography half a century B.C. So why wasn't the Sermon on the Mount properly taken down? If it was so important, why wasn't it taken down? Tell me that, asked Rud, in the wicked recesses of his heart. He was incapable of realising the gross incongruity, the indignity, the repulsiveness, of scriptures based on a shorthand draft.

According to Rud, Christianity was done for, within a century of its foundation. For want of trustworthy reporting, By that time it had got itself mixed up with Mithraism, Egyptian Trinitarianism, blood sacrifices and the Hebrew Promise. It had acquired entangling dogmas. What a pitiful story of complication and confusion it had been—all for the want of a man of Rud's lucidity. A good start gone wrong. Corruption had been inevitable. Christianity had found its Marx in Paul and its Stalinites and Trotskyites in the Gnostics and Arians. A swarm of Bishops and Fathers accumulated all over it and they suffocated it. It was dead and done for now, entirely mineralised. Rud tried over phrases in his mind. "Christianity—the best of it—fossilised first–century Communism. And the rest of it, marine–store junk."

What use was it to us? he asked himself. We were way up in the twentieth century. All that work had to be done over again. By less entangled minds…

One might claim to be an early Christian on occasion for controversial purposes, but that was all…

All that work had to be done over again. And again and over again until it was really done. There was no other way for mankind.

For five–and–twenty centuries at least, the Common Man had been making his frustrated upward thrusts against the power grabbers, the bullies, the conspirators and masterful people who enslaved and held him down. All the movements for reformation within Christendom, all the outbreaks of insurrectionary thought beyond its borders, Islam for example; the Renaissance, the Reformation, the great French Revolution; they were all upheavals of human common–sense against the corruptions and perversions that were perpetually developing to restrain it and hold it back. So Rud held. He was, he put it modestly, just one of the billions of common men held down by these conventions and superstitions. He was the commonest of common men. The quintessence. So it was he raged against them. From first to last he was on the side of the rebels. It was in his essential nature. From his swaddling clothes onward, the note of protest had sounded in his voice.

He hated all established things. He hated every established thing, good or bad, and his conception of the Common Man was fast assuming that same attitude of gigantic defiance against all the order and dignity of the world which characterised the cartoons of his Russian avatar, the Marxist Proletarian, hammer and sickle in hand.

In his private reveries the identification of the Common Man with Rud was plainly visible. And in the undisclosed depths of that reverie, his feeling towards every previous exponent of the Common Man idea was one of embittered rivalry. There was no limit to his jealousy.

When someone in the Group suggested that the Commonsense Movement was really Practical Christianity, Rud blew up and revealed something of what he had hidden away in his mind.

"Augh!" he cried, in querulous protest. "Clean all this past stuff off history, and begin again. If, after all, we are only going back to primitive Christianity, whatever it was, the 'simple teaching of Jesus' and all that (only I don't believe we are for a moment) then let these Christians find it out. We can't go into all these old disputes of theirs about their blessed Founder, what he was and what he wasn't, what he did and what he didn't do, now. They don't know themselves. He had his chance and lost it. Well, didn't he, Dreed? Very fine chap, no doubt, but his inefficiency was awful. And the inefficiency of everyone about him. Think of the march on Jerusalem and compare it with the march on Rome. Think of wandering about in a Garden until they came for him…He's smothered up, they've lost him, and it's for them to find him again. Not us. He's lost under nineteen centuries of theological deposits. Well, isn't he? Any living leader is worth a dead one, particularly a dead one who wasn't properly reported. What's the good of pretending he was? What's the good of all this smarming over what the Christians have? They haven't got anything clear and sound. Nothing at all.

"If we've got his stuff as you say, then, if it's the reality they care for and not just a name, let them fall in with us. Follow us. Why not? Why should we go after them? Let them sort out their Jesuses until they've got Mr. Right. But it isn't his stuff they care for, They never cared for his stuff. They care less for his stuff than I do. I'm a better Nazarene than any Christian alive. It's the Name. What's in a name? What is there in a name? Will human beings never grow out of name magic? Christianity, if it is all they say it is, by any other name would smell as sweet. Modern common–sense, that's what we stand for, and let other people make the identifications…

"Maybe he was the first modern Radical. Maybe, I say. But that's only historical speculation. Why go back to that? You've got Christianity plain before you. In the Churches. Look at 'em. Christianity is as Christianity does…

"Christianity! Look at the Archbishop of Canterbury all dressed up to kill, cope and mitre and holy rings and all the ancient spiritual gadgets; look at the Pope in his canonicals. B.C. all of it, from start to finish. Do you believe any of those fellows are mentally straight? I don't. Who told them they were entitled to speak for that Galilean Radical? If they'd lived in his time they'd have been on the bench with Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. They think they can put up their bluff upon the masses, and they aren't afraid of God looking at them—for a very good reason. Long ago they said in their hearts 'There is no God.' That's why they won't have these things talked about plainly. That's why they insist on reverence, sacred names and all that. A sacred thing is a protected thing, a thing in retreat. When you want to argue, they say 'Hush! Reverence, please. Lower your voices so that nobody can hear the awful things you are saying. Not so loud, please, and above all, not so plain.'

"They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post–mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now than the Pyramids."

So Rud, the Holy Terror, at his most raucous, banging the table, letting himself go about Christianity, in the councils of the Group. They heard him with a sort of horrified admiration.

"You can't say outrageous things like this—outside," said Bodisham.

"Not yet," said Rud. "But Mussolini and Hitler said almost as much—and got away with it. Russia again—no longer a Christian country. That thing's not going on for ever. High time it was wound up. We are making a new world, aren't we?—and the old rubbish has to be cleared away. Isn't it absolutely essential that the old rubbish should be cleared away? Or what is common sense supposed to be doing?

"Why! Think what happened the other day at Forli! Canopy, croziers, censers, banners, little boys in lace and petticoats, and what effect did it have? 'Go home, you old fool,' he said, 'and change those ridiculous clothes. Get into shorts and do some exercises.' And the people cheered!"

"Real belief in Christianity," said Chiffan, "may be at an ebb in the world, Rud, but shockableness is still high. Reverence is something that survives belief. In these northern countries particularly. I knew a little boy once whose head was smacked, smacked soundly by his own mother, for cocking snooks at Stonehenge. I'm not sure I don't agree with her. So you'd better be careful."

"I shall be careful," said Rud. "But Forli, mind you, wasn't shocked…

"The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hundred and fifty years. Now we take it on. Our movement. The new wave of attack." "And fill a ditch in our turn," said Irwell.

"Maybe we're over the last ditch," said Rud. "There must be a last ditch somewhere…

"All other revolutionary movements have been experiments so far, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and more or less failures. They were experiments in liberation and they did not liberate. The old things wriggled back. But ours may be the experiment that succeeds. We may get to the Common–sense World State. Yes—we—in this room…Why not? It has to come somehow, somewhen…If it doesn't come pretty soon, there won't be much of humanity left to liberate."